Xfce is an excellent project, but there's so much fragmentation going on in the desktop area that I really hope it doesn't dilute their work. There's been talk of moving to GTK3, but that's going to be a lot of work. Maybe they're just going to wait for GTK4 at this point.

Your right GTK3 is most likely going to be a lot of work.

I like Fedora with the XFCE DE!

Most of the people that work with all of the distribution and DE are volunteers, I would imagine that the folks working on improving XFCE and planning the work for GTK are volunteers as well.

They must be dedicated like the folks here at LQ to do this work.

Oh yeah! :hattip:

I am also eagerly following how XFCE gets along. I really love XFCE 4.10 and hoping 4.12 is also along these excellent lines ... :)

If I could get 4.12 here faster I would:-)
LOL!

Unfortunately not going to GTK3 doesn't help with fragmentation either.

I have heard a lot of complaints about XFCE specifically, how a lot of applications look "broken" because XFCE is GTK2 and someone runs a GTK3 application. It's gotten better as more themes have GTK2 and 3 versions, but if XFCE itself made the move, it would maybe push application and theme developers to make the move as well.

gtk3 is a big pain in the ass. I really wouldn't mind at all if xfce kept using gtk2 for the next 2-4 years.


I don't think the xfce dev team will ever be able to make the transition. They suffer delays now. I can't imagine them switching everything over to gtk3 without it taking 5 years.

Now that I will agree. I have been working on a program I had started and abandoned years ago and decided to go with GTK3... having to create menu and tool button widgets and then define in XML too? WTF?

The problem with XFCE staying with GTK 2 would be the total lack of Wayland support. If they want to support Wayland they have to go for GTK 3. Although I personally think that GTK 3 is a mess and I would rather see them port XFCE to Qt 5, but this is very unlikely.

+100

I hope Xfce has a future, but I tend to keep an eye on other projects such as RazorQt just in case they decide to stop developing Xfce.

Well, here we are, just a week short of it being 1 year since I started this thread and within a couple of months of it being 2 years since the release of Xfce 4.10.

Has there been any concrete news on Xfce 4.12? Any idea of when it might be released other than, "when it's ready"?
:)

On the topic of GTK3:
Certain components already support GTK3, along with GTK2 (or can be compiled with either of them) - for example just recently the panel was updated and allows both GTK2 and 3 based plugins.

Also, there are some GTK styles that work with both GTK2 and 3 programs. I use the "Clearlooks Phenix" theme which can do that and its available in the Debian repos.

The official page:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.12/roadmap
States:
You can check out the development with the 4.11 dev branch, here:
http://git.xfce.org/

Yes, I'm well aware of that page and check it and the forum frequently.

I fully understand that Team Developers are incredibly busy people but it appears that it's been well over a year--

Does anyone think that (XFCE 4.12) has been abandoned?

Maybe they are not willing to go for GTK?....And that's why?

Just trying to understand what is holding up the show--

Doesnt seem so, they have recent commits in their git. But their roadmap has 2013 as they year of release so it clearly takes more time than they thought it will.

Well, there is this,

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTYwNTQ

But it simply repeats what gradinaruvasile said 4 posts back.